Chairman of the Board: The game awakens

‘Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game’ review

By Ed Appleby, Illustrator

One thing you learn early on in your experience playing board games—usually when you’re being thoroughly destroyed at Monopoly by an older cousin—is that you don’t have to be good at a game to enjoy it.

Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game is a battle strategy game for 2–4 players designed and published by Fantasy Flight Games in 2012. Players pilot space ships for either the Rebel Alliance or the Galactic Empire, going through a sequence of move-then-attack referred to as the Flightpath system. You can only attack enemy ships when they’re within your firing arc, so you need to manoeuvre your ships strategically. There are many scenarios, but the game almost always boils down to a “last team standing” goal.

I cannot emphasize enough how bad I am at this game. Anyone who has experience with tactical miniature games—be they traditional war games or more fantasy-based games such as Warhammer—will see the pedigree in X-Wing.

Once you move past the first scenario and start building ships to fight each other in space, the game starts to drag in the planning phase. Even though there are a very limited number of ships to choose from, the number of pilots and modifications can draw out the setup phase to the point where it takes significantly longer than the gameplay itself.

If Star Wars isn’t your thing, there are also Star Trek and Dungeons and Dragons versions of the game, which also use the same Flightpath system. I don’t know if the games could be combined, but since the rules are basically the same I wouldn’t be surprised.

The game itself is a nice alternative to traditional miniature war gaming, which can get very expensive once you start to expand the number of figures you have. Even so, if you want to get into X-Wing, you might want to invest in an organizer or tool box to keep all of the figures you accrue over time.